Hand Gesture Emoji PNG
👌✋👋🤚🖐️🖖🤞🤟🤘🤙👊✊👍👎👏🙌👐🙏🤝🤜🤛
Hand Gesture emojis can be tricky. There are so many hand gestures with dramatically different meanings in real life that it’s not uncommon to confuse them. When it comes to emojis, the small size adds to the problem. When in a hurry, you may easily overlook the difference between the Love-You Gesture emoji and the Sign of the Horns emoji, for instance.
As if to make matters worse, the meaning of hand gestures varies from one culture to another.
Let’s take three simple hand emojis, for starters, and see how to use them without unknowingly running the risk of making a social blunder!
Meaning and Use of the Hand Gesture Emoji
👌 The most widely used one is probably the OK Hand emoji. You might think nothing can go wrong here.
Yet, it won’t hurt to be careful using it in some circumstances – it can be interpreted as a reference to White Supremacy. For instance, the Anti-Defamation League, a well-known Jewish civil rights organization, included it in its “Hate on Display” list in 2019. The organization claimed that some communities have been using it as a symbol of the far right and white supremacy.
Moreover, the OK gesture and emoji can be interpreted as offensive in certain parts of the EU, the Middle East, and South America.
Another rare meaning of the Okay emoji is telling someone you don’t care much. The space between the two fingers forming a circle (or a zero) shows how little you care.
✌️ The Victory Hand emoji is omnipresent. Also known as the Peace Sign and under multiple other names, it can be used in various contexts.
This Peace Sign emoji is sometimes used to wish someone goodnight or to say goodbye. This usage is rooted in the “peace out” idiom, which is widely used in English. It can also be a way to stop a fight and show someone that you see their words or actions as a kind of aggression and don’t want to answer them. The symbol’s use in the meaning of the “end of war” goes back to the 1940s.
The emoji can be a way to say “Peace be with you” or show your laid-back mood (“I’m just chilling”).
The same hand gesture icon can refer to the number 2, the meaning borrowed from the American Sign Language.
🤟 The Love-You Gesture emoji was inspired by the gesture from the American Sign Language. The reasoning behind this meaning is that this hand sign combines three letters from the ASL: the “I,” the “L,” and the “Y.”
When a person is pressed for time, it’s not unusual to use the Sign of the Horns instead of the Love-You Hand Gesture emoji. The only difference is the position of the thumb: it is pointing outward in the Love-You icon, forming the letter “L.”
Technical Information
👌 The OK Hand emoji was introduced in the Unicode 6.0 release (2010) as “OK Hand Sign” and became part of Emoji 1.0 in 2015.
Alternative names: “OK Hand Sign” (Apple), “Okay,” and “Perfect.”
Code: U+1F44C
✌️ The Victory Hand emoji was approved in 1993 as part of the Unicode 1.1 collection with the name “I Love You Hand Sign.” In 2015, it was published within Emoji 1.0.
Alternative names: “Peace Hand Sign” (Apple), “Air Quotes,” “Peace,” and “V Sign.”
Code: U+270C, U+FE0F.
🤟 The Love-You Gesture emoji was first published as “I Love You Hand Sign” in the Unicode 10.0 release (2017). The same year, the icon was added to Emoji 5.0.
Code: U+1F91F.
Conclusion
The hand gesture emojis are more or less safe and easy to use. Yet don’t forget that in some cultures, the OK Hand emoji is associated with some marginal political groups, while the Love-You Gesture emoji is commonly confused with the Sign of the Horns icon.
